35 Creative Logo Design Ideas (Cool + Modern Inspiration for 2023)

If you’re starting a business, you’re going to need a logo—and not just any old logo, but a smart, creative logo design idea that clearly differentiates you from other businesses in your niche. 

We’ve written 35 Creative Logo Design Ideas as a guide for new businesses like yours to help you identify best practices when it comes to creating an effective logo and to help you tap into the best creative logo design ideas around today. 

We'll start by discussing seven core inspiring logo design trends. Then we share unique, creative logo design ideas from Envato Elements and Envato's Placeit logo maker for each trend!

How to Make a Creative Logo: 6 Essential Tips for 2023

1. Start With Your Brand Identity

A creative logo’s job is to act as the face of a company, but it can’t sum up everything about a company. A logo is just one part of your company’s larger brand identity and grows out of your brand story. Take some time to think about why your company does what it does, who it serves, where and how it'll make a difference, and what it stands for.

Contemplating these questions will help you create an effective brand strategy and create well-considered visuals and messaging that'll support the meaning of your creative logo design and over time make it memorable.

2. Understand the Basic Forms Creative Logos Take

Before you create your own innovative, creative  logo, it's important to know the three basic forms logos take so you can decide which is best for your particular brand. The most creative logos are either:

• an image-based symbol, e.g. Twitter
• a text-based symbol, e.g. Google
• an image and text-based symbol, e.g. Puma

3. Be Aware of the Qualities That Make the Most Creative Logos

Innovative, creative logo design ideas are:

• simple
• relevant
• memorable
• versatile 
• use colour thoughtfully
• reference trends intelligently

If you want to learn more about cool, creative business logo ideas, read the article below:

• 

  What Makes a Good Logo? 7 Top Logo Design Tips & Guidelines

  

  Nona Blackman

  22 Dec 2018

4. Look to Trends for the Best Creative Logo Design Inspiration

Trends aren't to be followed blindly, but they’re a great reference point for unique, creative logo design ideas and inspiration. Current trends and styles may:

• embrace simplicity
• celebrate colour
• use typography imaginatively
• experiment with geometry 
• make creative use of negative space
• go retro
• get playful

Later, we’ll look more closely at these inspiring logo designs and show you some cool and innovative logo ideas for businesses that apply them tastefully.

5. Be Aware of the Competition

Studying the logos of businesses both in your niche and outside it is a great way to find the best creative logo design inspiration and to refine your own creative design ideas.

When you look at simple creative logos, ask yourself whether the logos reflect the six qualities of good logo design. If so, how, and if not, how do they deviate? When you look at the logos of companies in your niche, do you see any commonalities between them?

If so, ask yourself how you can buck their trend to differentiate yourself and make your creative logo designs stand out. 

6. Experiment

The best creative ideas for logos probably won’t come to you in your sleep—although they might. More likely, you’ll come up with cool logo creative design ideas through a process of experimentation with some trial and error. If you don’t hit on just the right design immediately, don’t be discouraged—just keep working on your creative design ideas until they’re resolved. 

7 Creative Logo Design Ideas and Trends for 2023

Here are seven current logo trends with an inspiring logo design idea for each trend from Envato Elements, along with four creative ideas for logos for each from the Placeit logo maker.

Trend 1. Embrace Simplicity

Because your cool creative logo is the foundation of your brand’s identity, you may believe that it's got to be complicated. In an attempt to create something original, you may try to cram as many ideas and elements as you can into this small symbol. 

What you need to do is actually the opposite. If you’ve done your homework and studied the logos of a variety of brands for creative business logo design ideas, you know that simplicity is a dominant feature of the best logos. Simplicity has been the buzzword in contemporary graphic design, and by extension logo design, for a long time. 

The most creative simple logos allow a viewer to recognise it at a glance and to remember it long after they first laid eyes on it. The other benefit of simplicity in creative logo design is that it allows the logo to work in a variety of applications, from digital to print. If you use lots of lines, colours, gradients, and fine details, your logo is probably going to break down when scaled and lose its integrity. To test your design, try fitting it into a one-inch square and judge the results. 

If you want your logo to be memorable and versatile, remember the old adage: Less is more. You can still have an innovative creative logo without adding in all the bells and whistles.

Trend 2. Celebrate Colour

Bright colours have been a dominant trend in graphic design for a while. And with good reason: colour has a profound effect on the human psyche that you need to take into consideration. You should understand the impact of the colours you choose on your target audience and select company logo colours they'll respond to positively.  

When you’re looking for cool creative logo ideas, keep your eye on the way colour is used and think about the message you want to communicate with colour in your branding and logo design. If you want to know more about colour and how to combine it effectively in logo design, read 10 Best Logo Colour Schemes & Combinations.

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  10 Best Logo Colour Schemes & Combinations (With Examples)

  

  Nona Blackman

  24 Oct 2022

Trend 3.  Use Typography Imaginatively

One of the most exciting developments in contemporary and creative ideas for logos is the creative use of typography, which has seen many brands moving away from image-based logos and text-and-image logos and embracing purely text-based logos. 

With this type of logo, typography is used imaginatively to represent the company’s full name, monogram, or initial. Text-based logos are a good option for a business with a relatively short name as it gets the name out there and is easy to associate with the brand.

Typographical experimentation can also be applied to text-and-image logos where, as in the innovative creative logo examples below, a letter in the company’s name is replaced with relevant objects while keeping the company name recognisable. Experimentation can also lead to developing new typographic shapes, incorporating photography, modifying existing typefaces, and more. 

Trend 4. Experiment With Geometry

We learn all about geometric shapes—squares, rectangles, circles, triangles—in primary school, and as it turns out, these shapes play an important role in logo design. These basic shapes bring symmetry and a structured look and feel to simple creative logos. 

Geometric and creative logos are so simple that they can be scaled easily and consistently, and they've got the added benefit of communicating the fundamental qualities of a business in a direct way.

• squares = reliability, stability, order
• circles = wholeness and harmony
• triangles that point up = power  
• triangles that point down = instability

These qualities make geometrical shapes a perennial favourite in innovative creative logo design. When used in the contemporary context, think of keeping their look fresh with bright colour palettes.

Trend 5. Make Use of Negative Space

Looking for creative ideas for your logo? Making use of negative space in innovative and clever ways is quite a skill. Negative space is the background space around and between a logo symbol. 

For example, if your logo is two birds sitting on a branch, the birds and branch, the shape of the birds and the branch are positive space, and everything around them is negative space. Shaping the birds and the branch in such a way that an area of the background (the negative space) forms another image is what we mean here by making creative use of negative space. Doing so strategically adds another layer of meaning to your logo and can charm and entertain your target audience. 

Trend 6. Go Retro

As a counter to the clean simplicity in contemporary design, ever so slowly, the design aesthetics of anywhere from the 1950s to the early 90s are beginning to creep into logo design, maybe as a result of pre-digital nostalgia. 

Whatever the case, design influences from the past are resurfacing, albeit with a contemporary twist. They give brands an opportunity to set themselves apart from competitors by mashing together a variety of elements to come up with cool creative logo ideas. 

Trend 7. Get Playful

Getting playful with your logo designs will always win you points with your target audience. Though a playful logo is an obvious fit for businesses that target children, it doesn’t mean that they're the only businesses that could benefit from adding playful twists to their logo design. 

It's true, however, that this approach won’t work with every business. If you’re a financial or legal business, for example, you may want to stay clear of this style idea, but there are a host of other businesses that would do well to communicate a penchant for lightheartedness and fun through their cool logos. 

More Elegant Logo Design Inspiration to Try in 2023

If you’re looking for more creative logo ideas, it’s always helpful to check out more than one source. That’s why we’re including a few creative logo design suggestions from Envato Elements.